Tour De Dandong - Day 2 Part I

Continuing in the exciting adventures of the Tour De Dandong day 2 turned out to be a fairly adventurous day for the riders. I will split this post into 2 parts: 1) Part I the day's ride and Part II the night's accommodation. For now - Part I.

The plan was to set off from the ChengZiTan bathhouse at 9 AM with Team Phoenix getting the lead spot in light of their 11 PM arrival the evening before. Our plans were scrubbed when 3 of the riders awoke in the morning to find that a thief had made off with 2000 rmb (400 Cdn), an Ipod, and a camera. The bathhouse owners were alerted and they promptly brought in the police. This is where things got strange. The police dragged their investigative heels suggesting that we would all have to stay for a full day while the "investigation" took place. We were on a pretty tight schedule so that was out. At that point the hotel owners wanted a meeting with our Chinese racer, Leon. We were instructed to turn off the cameras as Leon told us we were about to engage in some "dirty Chinese business." The owner initially offered 6000 rmb in compensation for making the police go away but as the hours of the morning progressed this quickly got reduced to 2000 rmb and then finally nothing. "Dirty Chinese business" indeed.

As far as the race goes however Team Phoenix eventually left at 10AM and made great time on Day 2 -- mostly. The team of YongJiu and Jin Lu were not far behind as they all made a smooth exit. However for FengHuang things went wrong in the form of Billy's broken chain. What should have been a routine 10 or 15 minute fix turned into a 4 hour delay as the mechanics went AWOL and Billy had to resort to help from Team HongQi in order to get him rolling. Without adequate tools it was quite a patch-up job but eventually he got rolling. In addition Team HongQi also suffered a huge setback when Adrian's motor conked out and he spent time in ChengZiTan trying to get a new one or have the old one repaired.

While this was going on Team Phoenix suffered its first big setback of the day. Fouad and Jack's frames broke in the midafternoon. Not cracked, but broken completely through! On the sloping downtube where the motor mounts is a great deal of the motor's weight coupled with metal fatigue from being bolted on and the vibrations of a 2 stroke engine make for a perfect storm. They spent the better part of 4 hours in the city of ZhuangHe at a welder's shop where he did all of the repair work FOR FREE! You read it right - FREE. Simply amazing.

Meanwhile Adrian got his motor working enough to putter down the road but at a significantly reduced average speed of about 25 km/h (the bikes could do 40+ at full throttle). The luck didn't stick with Adrian however as his motor just deteriorated further and further. Finally a fellow team member, Mike, had to rope-tow him 45 km into the city of ZhuangHe where Marshall (one of the marshalls coincidentally enough) found a replacement motor. The mechanics had assured us that there wouldn't be one to find in ZhuangHe and that they had checked around. Not sure why but they really sh*t the bed on Day 2. They refused to help some people, went AWOL for hours and then made no effort to locate a replacement motor.

Also in terms of support crew we had a cameraman quit and hop a bus in ZhuangHe back to Dalian because he had to work the following day. Before leaving he spent 15 minutes telling one of the driver's friends how to operate the camera and ta-dah we had a new cameraman! It remains to be seen the quality of his work however.

In ZhuangHe the teams of FengHuang, Hong Qi and 2 members of Team Phoenix (Jack and Fouad) waited patiently as the mechanics worked through the necessary repairs. I have neglected to mention that Trevor (of FengHuang) had his gas tank fall off (bolts rattled loose) and break his throttle cable and numerous other things. The mechanics paid dearly for their 3-4 hours of inaction by being put under the gun to get things done quickly as darkness was approaching and the final destination lay another 60 km away.

At around 6 PM 4 members of Team Phoenix, all of YongJiu and all of Jin Lu arrived at our day 2 destination in Mu Er Shan outside of LiZiTang village. At the same time the rest of the riders were just leaving ZhuangHe and had 60 km to cover in rapidly advancing darkness. For accommodations we all stayed in the countryside in people's homes and I will post more on that in Part II of this entry.

Back to the race.

Trevor's troubles were not over. His motor was not working well for quite sometime as he rode from ZhuangHe to Mu Er Shan. As his teammates and Jack and Fouad sped away he was joined by Harry from his team who agreed to ride with him no matter how long it took. After about 20 minutes of barely puttering along his engine suddenly roared to life and he took off like a bat out of hell. In the accompanying film crew car we were quite relieved to be moving a bit quicker as toodling around the countryside in a car doing 25 km/hr quickly loses its charm. Our joy was shortlived as unbelievably Trevor's frame also broke in two. He had another 30 km to go but his ride was done for that night. I honestly thought he would be done for the tour unless we could get him back into ZhuangHe in the morning for more welding. This would have tied up the mechanics resources for a few hours so we weren't sure how the other riders would be with that.

Harry, Trevor and myself (along with the film crew) waited alongside the road in the dark for an hour waiting for Team HongQi and the mechanics truck. When they arrived we loaded Trev's bike onto the truck, he hopped in the film crew's car and Harry rode with HongQi into Mu Er Shan with the mechanics truck using their headlights to light the way. This night riding was much safer than the previous evening as the road had wide shoulders, little traffic and no gusting winds.

As mentioned we stayed in people's homes that night but I think the description of that hospitality really deserves its own separate post so stay tuned for Tour De Dandong Day 2 - Part II.